A review of a review
First,
Yet, philosophy and politics constantly risk becoming disassociated in the academy. In Organs, Zizek explains how intellectualism gets "caught up in the academy" through the fetishistic splits performed by academics. A prevailing assumption in the academy across disciplines (from literature studies in the humanities to anthropology in the social sciences to quantum physics in the hard sciences) espouses the "necessary" split between one's "theoretical" academic work and one's life, between one's theory and one's practice. Instead of somehow unleashing our intellectualism, the split produces a spatial gap and a temporal lag that affords capitalism the space-time to further self-revolutionize.
This is a point that those that know me well, know I like to emphasize. It’s generally summarized in brief statements like, “we have to begin by assuming that NOTHING is not normative.” Even if this normativity is negative: via apathy, or passivity – the lines of communication are to omniapparent now for anyone to deny that there is suffering. If you are not trying to do something about it, then you are lame (Of course this does not call for blind action – you might try and figure things out.), and you are onl contributing to its prolongation. The neutrality that so many academics seek is so much the driving force of “late capitalism” (that’s Jameson, and the reviewer does a great job of integrating him into his review). Postmodernism, at least as it is most broadly practiced seems to fall flat on its purportedly emancipatory face. The origins of my distrust lay in two places: firstly, Jameson was the first theorist I ever read; secondly, my own uneasy ascent from poverty into the bourgeois academic establishment. I disliked intellectuals then, and I do now – either you have some goal in mind, and in this respect you are a crusader (for whatever cause), or you are a lifer, and a parasite on society. Why? I can only use this terminology in retrospect, but a crusader has a clear becoming – they are someone, a trajectory for instance, I can speak to.
Also, Zizek will argue in tandem with Lacan,
Only a new and original form of collective social life can overcome the isolation and monadic autonomy of the older bourgeois subjects in such a way that individual consciousness can be lived - and not merely theorized - as an 'effect of structure' (Lacan).
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